


a rose by any other name

by nowriterwrong



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Royalty, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-26 02:18:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13848012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowriterwrong/pseuds/nowriterwrong
Summary: "As the music began and his arms closed around her, Jason felt her shiver. Then the melody caught her and she moved with him – so light, so completely one with him that he could guide her with a finger. Yet as he held her he had no thought of thistledown or snowflake. Here, beneath his hands, was tempered steel, was flame."Piper’s family are wealthy aristocrats in a time of Russian revolution, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is fatally shot and the idea of war begins to stir amongst the Russian People. As the Bolsheviks take control of Russia, Piper loses everything – including her family and her home. She and her last surviving brother are forced to become refugees, fleeing to the safety of England – where Piper becomes housemaid to an English lord recently returned from war.She falls for his heart and his home and everyone she encounters within it – including the erratic May Castellan, the snobbish Luna… and the lord whom she may never ever allow herself to love.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I want to thank [shelbychild](http://shelbychild.tumblr.com/) and [becauseannabeth](https://becauseannabeth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for beta reading this chapter! You're both amazing!  
>   
>  _"They loved her inordinately, with an odd devotion commonly reserved for the gods and the stars, but Piper, with her dusky, duckling feather hair, her look of being about to devour life in all its glory, was unlike any other child the count and countess had ever known."_

In a palace overlooking the river Neva, there lived a family on whom the gods had lavished their gifts with a comical abundance.

The count and countess possessed – in addition to the eighty-roomed palace on the quay – an estate in the Crimea, another on the Don, and a hunting lodge in Poland.

The count, who was aide-de-camp to the Tsar, also owned a paper mill in Finland, a coal mine in the Urals, and an oil refinery in Sarkahan.

The countess alone could count among her jewels the diamond and sapphire pendant which Sazikov had designed for Catherine the Great, and had inherited, in her own right, shares in the Trans-Siberian railway and a parcel of land outside Kiev.

But the real treasure of Afrodita’s household – its winter garden rampant with hibiscus and passion flowers, its liveried footmen and scurrying maids – was a tiny, brown-haired, bird-thin baby girl, delivered, swathed in layers of pale grey silk, one white summers night.

They loved her inordinately, with an odd devotion commonly reserved for the gods and the stars, but she, with her dusky, duckling feather hair, her look of being about to devour life in all its glory, was unlike any other child the count and countess had ever known.

On this button sized countess, her adoring father showered the diminutives which came so readily to Russian lips: ‘Little Soul’ of course, and ‘ _Doushenka_ [[1](%E2%80%9C#note1%E2%80%9D)]’. But, most often, ‘Little Candle’ or ‘Little Star’ – paying tribute to the strange, incandescent quality in this child, who so obviously possessed her mother’s dark, voluptuous beauty and her father’s traditional good looks.

Like most members of the St Petersburg nobility, the McLean’s were cultured, cosmopolitan and multilingual. The count and countess spoke French to each other; Russian was for servants, children, and the act of love; English and German were only used when it was unavoidable.

By the time she was four years old, Piper had already had three governesses. But it was the last of these – Miss Hestia, a gaunt and angular spinster from Putney, London, with whose smile one could have melted butter – that Piper inexplicably chose to worship. At the hands of her beloved Englishwoman she endured cold baths and scrubbings with Pears soap, the wrenching open of sealed bedroom windows, and that ultimate martyrdom: the afternoon walk.

“Very bracing,” Miss Hestia would comment, steering the tiny, fur-trussed countess – rigid in her three layers of cashmere, her sable coat and her felt valenki – along the icy quays and gigantic squares of the city.

“Not at all like the dear Thames,” she would say, watching a party of Lapps encamped on the solid white wastes of the Neva, and receiving, on the end of her crimsoned nose, a shower of snow from an overhanging caryatid.

It was during these Siberian walks that Piper would meet other children who shared her exalted martyrdom: pint-sized princelings, diminutive countesses, muffled bankers’ daughters, all clinging like clumps of moss to the granite boulders of their English governesses.

Her adored Prince Leonidas, for example, one month younger than Piper, face framed between the earmuffs of his shapka, pink with impending frostbite and outraged manhood as he trudged behind his intrepid Miss Dalida. Or the green-eyed, endearingly dimpled Reychel Elizabeth Dare, hardly bigger than the ermine muff in which she attempted to warm her reddened nose.

Yet, it was during those arctic afternoon excursions that Piper – stitching together the few remarks Hestia, wind buffeted and rumpled, would allow herself – became possessed, utterly and gratefully, of a country summed of little, sunlit fields, and parks that were evergreen. A patchwork country, flower-filled and gentle, in which a smiling queen stood on street corners bestowing roses upon a grateful populace… a country without winter or anarchists, whose name was England.

* * *

Piper grew, and nothing was too good for her. When she was five her father gave her a white and golden boat with a tasseled crimson canopy, in which four liveried oarsmen rowed her on picnics to the islands. Each Christmas, one of Fabergé’s craftsmen fashioned for her an exquisite beast so small she could very easily carry it in her palm: a springing leopard of lapis lazuli, a jade gazelle with shining ruby eyes… And to draw her sledge through the park of Polukrovka, their estate on the Don, the count conjured up two silver-haired Siberian yaks.

“You spoil her,” said Miss Hestia, smiling affectionately at her charge.

“I may spoil her,” the count would reply, “but is she spoilt?”

And the strange thing was that Piper wasn’t, and this was the reason for Hestia’s smile.

This little girl – wobbling on a pile of cushions on the fully-extended piano stool to practise her études, twirling obediently with her beloved Leonidas to the beat of a polonaise at dancing class, or reciting _Les Malheurs de Sophie_ during French class – showed no sign whatsoever of selfishness or pride. It was as though her mother’s cosseting, the fussing of the servants, her father’s limitless adoration, produced in her only a kind of unexpected humility. Miss Hestia, watching her young charge hawk-eyed, had to admit herself defeated. If there was ever such a thing as natural born goodness, it existed undoubtedly in this child.

When Piper was six years old, the gods tilted their cornucopia over the family once again and, in the spring of 1905, the Countess gave birth to two twin sons: Nestor and Alexander.

The babies were enchanting: brown-eyed, bronze haired, and firmly and delectably fat. The count and countess – who had longed for a son and now, unbelievably, had two – were ecstatic. Friends and relations flocked to congratulate, and old Hecate, the ferocious Greek wet nurse, filled the house with her mumbling jubilation.

Seeing this, Miss Hestia moved closer to the miniature countess, as did the phalanx of tutors and grooms and servants who surrounded the little girl, waiting for jealousy and tantrums.

But they waited in vain. To Piper, her brothers were a miracle of which she never tired. She had to be plucked from their bedside at night time, and would be found in her nightdress at dawn, kneeling beside their cot and telling them long and complex stories, to which they listened eagerly, their heads pressed against the wooden bars.  
Love begets love – As they grew, Alexander and Nestor followed their sister everywhere, their cries of: “Wait for us, Piper!” in lisping Russian, entreating English, or fragmented French, echoing through the birch forests of Polukrovka, along the tamarisk-fringed beaches of the Crimea, or the rich, dark rooms of the palace in St Petersburg.

And Piper did wait for them. She was to do so always.

As she moved from the idyll of her childhood into adolescence, Piper, still looking like an incandescent fledgling, only ran harder at the glory that was life.

She fell in love with the beautiful Reychel Dare, then with the blind piano tuner who tended the court’s Bechsteins, and later with Chaliapin who came to sing gypsy songs in his dark and smoky voice after the opera.

And then Diaghilev brought his dancers back from their triumphant tour of Europe, and Piper – who for years had hung out of her parents’ blue and silver box at the Mariinsky _being_ the doomed Swan Queen or mad Giselle – took up with a passion the cause of the rogue impresario and the dazzling, modern ballets which stuffy St Petersburg had condemned out of hand.

“ _Kak prekrasno!_ Oh, how beautiful it all is!” was Piper’s cry during these years: of the glistening dome of St Isaacs soaring above the mist, of the Raphael Madonna in the Hermitage, of a remarkably improper négligé in a shop window on the Nevsky Prospekt.

There seemed no reason why this fabled life should ever end. In 1913, Russia was prosperous and busy with the celebrations to mark three hundred years of Romanov rule. In the spring of that year, Piper, holding down her wriggling brother Xander, attended a Thanksgiving service at Kazan Cathedral in the presence of the Tsar and Tsarina. A few days later she helped her mother dress for the great costume ball in the Salles de la Noblesse…

“It’ll be your turn soon, my love,” said the countess as she fastened the famous Lyubovnik emeralds over her wine-dark boyar dress, and set the sun-shaped, golden kokoshnik onto her abundant hair. For, of course, she had planned Piper’s debut for years – knew to the last hair on their well-born heads the young men she would permit to address, and ultimately espouse, her daughter.

There was just one more year of picnics in the birch forests around Polukrovka, of skating parties and theatricals with Leo and the pretty, frivolous Reychel.

And then the Archduke, with the face of an ill-tempered bullfrog, and the charming wife who had so dearly and unaccountably loved him, were assassinated at Sarajevo.

To the Russians, accustomed to losing Tsars and grand dukes time and time again in this way, it seemed just another in an endless succession of political murders. But this time the glittering toy that was the talk of war slipped from the hands of the politicians… and a world ended.

Overnight, German tutors, grooms, and servants became the “enemy” and had to be escorted to the Warsaw station under guard. Then, one by one, every servant who had so greatly adorned her childhood fled back to their homes. But Miss Hestia stayed.

“God keep you safe, my Little Star,” the count whispered to Piper, holding her close. “Look after your mother and brothers.” Then, he rode away down the Nevsky, looking unutterably splendid in his uniform of the Chevalier Guards.

Three months later, he lay dead in a swamp-infested Prussian forest and the flame that had burned in his daughter since birth flickered and died.

* * *

They carried on. The countess – now aged by ten years – organised soup kitchens and equipped a fleet of ambulances at her own expense. 

Although Piper was too young to officially enrol as a nurse, she spent each day at the Anglo-Russian Hospital in St Petersburg, rolling bandages and making dressings.

When the revolution came and the Bolsheviks seized power from the moderates, the McLean’s fared badly. They had been too close to the court and, with no one to advise them, they tarried too long in the two rooms of their looted palace in which the authorities allowed them to use.

In the following months, her mother fell desperately ill, catching typhus in the squalor of the hospitals she volunteered at.

As her mother grew steadily worse, Piper took over the running of the house, organising the queues for bread and the foraging for fuel. Despite Hestia’s insistence that she could care for Piper’s brothers herself, Piper maintained that they were her responsibility.

So, when Xander was killed at the hands of the Bolsheviks in the crossfire of a church looting, Piper couldn’t forgive herself. Her conscience would be forever haunted by the image of her brother, Nestor, running home, bloody and sobbing and alone.

Having already lost her darling husband, the loss of a beloved son was too much for the Countess to bear. From the moment they buried Xander, to the moment she finally passed, the Countess remained utterly silent, the only sound permeating the quiet of their haunted home: her wailing, and her dying breaths.

Piper busied herself with Nestor, began preparations for them to leave, and only once her mother had finally joined Xander and the Count in peace, did Piper finally act – taking Hestia and her last remaining brother and joining the stream of refugees fleeing south to the Black Sea and Turkey.

They had entrusted the bulk of their jewels to Hecate – sending her ahead with a king’s ransom in pearls, emeralds and rubies, all hidden inside her shabby-looking luggage.

But the old woman never arrived at their rendezvous. They waited as long as they dared – unable to believe she had betrayed them – but were eventually compelled to travel wearily onward.

In March 1919 they reached Sevastopol, where Miss Hestia retired behind a palm tree to fish, from the pocket of her green chilprufe underwear, their last remaining jewel: the Orlov diamond – with which she persuaded the captain of a Greek trawler to take them to Constantinople.

A month later, they reached England.


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Standing in the tiny room, sealed off from the main body of the house and the world she had once known, she felt so bereft and homesick that tears sprang to her eyes._   
>  _Her father’s well-remembered voice came to save her. “When you’re sad, Little Star, go out of doors. It’s always better underneath the open sky.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank [shelbychild](http://shelbychild.tumblr.com/) and [becauseannabeth](https://becauseannabeth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for beta reading this chapter! You're both amazing!  
> 

“You cannot be a housemaid, Piper,” said Miss Hestia firmly. “It’s out of the question.”

“Yes I can, Hessy. I _must_. It is the only job they had vacant at the registry office. Elham is a very beautiful house. And it’s in the _country_ so it will be healthy, with fresh air!”

Piper’s long-lashed eyes glowed with fervour, and her expressive narrow hands sketched a gesture indicative of the Great Outdoors. Miss Hestia paused her mending of the countess’ last pair of silk stockings, and pushed her pince-nez up onto her forehead.

“Listen, dear, English households are not free and easy like Russian ones. There’s a great hierarchy below stairs: upper servants, lower servants, everything just so. And they can be very cruel to an outsider.”

“Hessy, I _cannot_ remain here living on your hospitality.” Piper’s face was beginning to flush an alarming shade of crimson – for Piper, always a sure sign of deep emotion. “Of course I would _rather_ be a taxi driver like Prince Sokharen or Colonel Tarek. Or a doorman at the Ritz like Prince Kulya. _Much_ rather. But I don’t think they will let women–”

“No, I don’t think they will either, dear,” Hestia said – an obvious attempt to deter Piper from her recurrent grievances. “And as for living on my hospitality… I’ve never heard such nonsense. If you stayed here all your life, I could never repay the kindness your family has shown me.”

They were sitting in the tiny parlour of the mews house in Paddington which Hestia, by sending home her savings, had managed to purchase for her old age. But it was not meant for so many people, and it was beginning to feel undeniably crowded.

“It’s alright for Princess Esperanza and Miss Delida, and all the other refugees, Hessy. They are neither well nor young but I… I need to work.”

“Yes, dear, I understand that. But _not_ as a housemaid. There must be something else.”

But in the summer of 1919, there wasn’t. Soldiers back from the war, woman discharged from the armament factories… they all haunted the employment agencies seeking jobs. For a young girl, untrained and foreign, the chances were bleak.

Nestor and Piper had arrived in London two months earlier. Virtually penniless and newly orphaned, Piper’s first thought had been for Nestor. Within days, Piper had braved the Grand Duchess Hera and extracted from that old friend of her grandfather’s the offer of Nestor’s school fees at a school in Yorkshire.

But for herself, Piper would take nothing.

“You’ll see, Hessy, it’ll be alright. Already I’ve found the most beautiful book. It’s called _The Compendium for Domestic Workers_ by Andrea Roderick, and it has two thousand and three pages and in it I shall find out everything!”

Hestia tried to smile. Despite her difficulties with reading, Piper had always been in possession of a “most beautiful book”: a volume of Lermontov from her father's library, a Dickens novel read during the white nights of summer when she should have been asleep.

“If you would just be patient, Piper. If you would just wait.”

Piper came over and knelt by Hestia’s chair. “For what?” she said gently. “For a millionaire to ride past on a dapple-grey horse and marry me?”

Hestia sighed. “No… I just… you can’t be a housemaid. What would your brother say?”

“I shan’t tell my brother. I’ll say I’ve been invited down as a guest. The job is not permanent; they’re taking on extra staff to prepare the house for the new earl. I shall be back before Nestor returns home from school. No one will even notice.”

Hestia considered in silence, until, finally: “You’d better make sure he never hears of it, then,” said Hestia drily, “or he’ll leave school at once and become an errand boy. He only agreed to go because he expects to support you in luxury the day he passes his school certificate.”

“He won’t hear a word,” said Piper, her voice tender as always as she spoke of her brother – remembering, as she often did, the twin who had never made it to England.

She cast a sidelong look at her governess, wondering if she could press her advantage further. “I think perhaps it would be sensible to cut off my hair. Short hair will be easier under a cap, and Reychel writes that it is becoming very chic.”

Reychel, whose family had fled to Paris, now had a job as a beautician, and Piper regarded her as the ultimate arbiter in matters of taste.

But neither of them needed to say aloud what was truly on her mind: her father, her mother, her brother…all dead. To cut her hair would be the ultimate tribute to them. She had wanted to do so at the transit camp in Constantinople, but never had the time of motivation – something was holding her back.

Hestia sighed. The comical dusky down that had covered Piper’s head in early childhood had become a waist length mantle, its richness shot through like watered silk with shades of chestnut, mahogany, and bronze. Hestia shook her head.

“Over my dead body will you cut your hair.”

* * *

Three days later, carrying a borrowed cardboard suitcase, Piper trudged up the famous avenue of double poplars toward the west facade of Elham, still hidden from her by the gentle fold of the Wiltshire hills.

The day was hot and the suitcase heavy – containing not only Piper’s meagre stock of clothing, but all two thousand and three pages of Andrea Roderick’s _Compendium for Domestic Workers_. Mrs Roderick’s three-volume tome, which clocked in at three and a half kilos, was to Piper a holy guide for her new career in servitude.

She looked with pleasure at the rolling parkland, the freshly sheared sheep cropping the grass, and the ancient oaks forming pools of foliage within the meadows. Even the slight air of neglect – the Queen Anne’s lace frothing the once-trim verges, the ivy tumbling from the gatehouse wall – only made the surrounding fields of Elham more beautiful.

“I shall curtsy to the butler,” decided Piper, rescuing and earthworm which had set off on a suicidal path across the desert dryness of the gravel. “And the housekeeper. Definitely, I shall curtsy to the housekeeper!”

She put down her case and stretched out her arms. A peacock fluttered by, displaying his slightly passé tail to her. She was growing rather nervous.

“‘The tops of old cotton stockings boiled in a mixture of new milk and hartshorn powder make excellent plate rags,’” recited Piper, picking up her case. She found quotations from The Source helped to steady the butterflies in her stomach. “‘A housemaid should never wear creaking boots and– ’” She broke off. “Oh!”

The Avenue had been curving steadily to the right, and Piper had come upon the house abruptly, just as William Kent, the genius who had landscaped the grounds, had intended her to.

Elham was honey-coloured, graceful, light.

There sat the central block, pillared and porticoed, a golden temple plucked from some halcyon landscape and set down in this gentle hollow of the Wiltshire Hills.

Wide steps ran up from either side to the great front door, their balustrades flanked by earns and calm-faced phoenixes. From the centre, two low wings, equally exquisite and identical, stretched north and south, their long windows looking out onto the terrace where fountains flowed.

Built for the first Earl of Selbourne, with that innate sense of balance which characterised the Palladian age, it exuded welcome and an incorrigible feeling of rightness. Piper, who had gazed unmoved on Rastrelli’s great ornate palaces, looked on, marvelled, and smiled.

The next moment, blending with the pale stone and the blonde sweep of gravel, a large lion-toned dog tore down the steps and bounded towards her, barking ferociously. An English mastiff – all soft, bloodshot eyes and a dewlap as black as sea coal – defending his master’s hearth.

“Oh hush,” said Piper, standing her ground, speaking softly in her native tongue. “Calm yourself. Surely you can see I'm not a burglar?”

Her voice, the strange low words with their caressing rhythms, got through to the dog. She braked suddenly and, while continuing to growl at one end, began with the other a faintly placating movement of her tail. Slowly Piper moved a hand to her muzzle. The dog came undone beneath her hands as she began to scratch at that lethal spot behind the ear where large dogs seemed to keep their souls.

For a while, Piper scratched on, and Luna – shaking off five years of loneliness while her master fought away at war – moaned with pleasure. When Piper picked up her case again, Luna followed her, butting her skirt lovingly with her great head.

Only when Luna saw that, unbelievably, Piper had turned away from the front of the house and was instead making her way through the archway, towards the servants’ quarters, did she stop with a howl of disbelief. There were places where, as the earl’s dog, it was simply not possible for her to go.

“Snob!” Piper called over her shoulder.

She crossed the grassy courtyard and found a flight of stairs which seemed to lead to the kitchens.

“I shall curtsy to everybody,” decided Piper, smoothing her skirt.

And she went forward to meet her fate.

* * *

Waiting to see what the London agency had sent him this time was Chiron the butler.

His expectations were low. He had already received, from the same source, an under-gardener who had fallen drunk into a cucumber frame, and a footman who’d attempted to hand a dish of mutton cutlets _gloveless_ and from the _right_.

But then, having to recruit servants from an agency was in every way against the traditions of Elham and just another unpleasantness resulting from this dreadful war.

With war came a loss of staff. In order to accommodate for this loss, Miss Beauregard, the housekeeper, had been forced to take on multiple roles within the household. The most important of these: the Dowager Countess’ personal maid.

Now, without a housekeeper – or rather, with a housekeeper too busy to keep house – the running of Elham fell to Chiron, and there could not have been anyone more worthy.

Chiron was in his forties, brown-haired, and quite possibly taller than any living man. His brown eyes gazed out from behind gold-rimmed spectacles with a formidable sort of intelligence. Chiron, like Miss Beauregard, had once been the head of a great line of perfectly drilled retainers: under-butlers and footmen, lamp boys and odd men, stretching away from him in increasing obsequiousness and unimportance.

To this epoch, the war had put an end. More than most great houses, Elham had given its life’s blood to the Kaiser’s war. Upstairs, it had taken Lady Thalia, the heir, who fell as a nurse at Ypres. Below stairs, it had drained away almost every able-bodied man, and few who left were destined to return. A groom had fallen on the Somme, and an under-gardener had drowned at Jutland. The hall boy, who had lied about his age, was blown up at Verdun a week before his eighteenth birthday. And while the men left to fight, the maids were left to work in the munitions factories, in offices, or on the land – creating, as they departed, a greater and greater burden for the servants who remained.

It was during those years that Chiron, sacrificing the status it had taken a lifetime to acquire, rolled up his sleeves and worked side by side with even the lowest of his retainers.

With the rigid protocol of the servants’ hall abandoned, even Hazel Levesque, the soft-spoken head kitchen maid, was persuaded to step into the shoes of the departed Italian chef who’d returned home to fight for his native land.

Lady Sally Jackson of Selbourne – the new earl’s aunt and honorary mother – had done what she could to ease the pressure on her depleted staff. She closed off the main body of the house and retired to the east wing with her novels and her letters – searching desperately for peace in leading her loved ones to their twilit world.

Inevitably, her sadness and seclusion took their toll. The shrouded rooms through which only the dog, Luna, now roamed, grew dusty and cold. In the once trim flower beds, wild grasses waved their blond and feathery heads. The proud peacocks of the topiary grew bedraggled for want of trimming.

Finally, when armistice was declared, the servants, waiting anxiously for news, wondered if Elham was to share the same fate as so many great houses: to go up for sale.

For the whole hope of the Selbourne House now lay in the one surviving son: Lady Thalia’s younger brother, Jason.

The new Earl had spent four years in the Royal Flying Corps, his life so perilous that even his honorary mother had not dared to hope he might be spared. But, though the plane had been shot down, though he’d been gravely wounded, Jason was alive. Soon, he was to be discharged from hospital. He was coming home.

But for good? Or only long enough to put his home on the market? Remembering the muted, unassuming boy, so different from his roughened, reckless sister, the servants could only wonder and wait.

For there were no clues in the instructions the new Earl had sent from his hospital bed; the staterooms were to be reopened, everything necessary to bring Elham up to its old standard was to be done – but any new staff engaged to make this possible were to be strictly temporary.

Hence the agency, which up to now had spelt nothing but disaster, and whose latest offering had just been admitted to the housekeeper’s room.

* * *

Piper had curtsied – she had curtsied deeply – and now stood before Chiron with clasped hands, awaiting her fate. Behind the intense focus required to overcome her nerves, she was surprised to be faced by the butler alone, without the housekeeper.

As he studied her, Chiron sighed.

He would not have found it easy to describe the characteristics of a housemaid, but he knew instinctively that – despite her navy coat and skirt, her high-necked blouse and drab straw boater – this girl possessed none of them.

The entry on ‘Slavonic Painting’ in his Encyclopaedia of World Art gave Chiron a head start in accounting for the long lustrous eyes framed in lashes the colour of sunflower seeds. It threw light, too, on the suppliant pose of her narrow, supple hands; the air of having simultaneously swallowed a lit candle and the sins of the world.

The saints on Russian icons, Chiron knew, were often apt to carry on that way.

It was there, however, that the religious motif came to an end.

Though Piper had attempted to secure her hair back into a demure knot, glossy tendrils had escaped from behind her strangulated ears, and her eyes, although found to be a deep brown, were disconcertingly flecked with shades of gold and green.

“Your name is Piper McLean?” asked Chiron, consulting the paper from the agency, painfully aware he was playing for time. “And you are of Russian nationality?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you have no previous experience with housework?”

“No, sir. But I will work very hard and I will _learn_.”

Chiron sighed and shook his head. For the girl’s accent – with it’s rolling ‘r’s and lilting intensity – quite failed to disguise her educated voice, as did the shabby coat and skirt, the grace of her movements.

‘Inexperienced’ was bad; ‘foreign’ was worse… but a lady! The agency had gone too far.

“I’m afraid you may not understand how hard you will be expected to work,” continued Chiron, still hoping to somehow avoid his fate. “We are taking on temporary staff for a period of intense cleaning and refurbishment prior to the Earl’s return. During this time no formal training would be given and you would be expected to make yourself useful anywhere: in the kitchens, the scullery, even outside.”

“Like a tweeny?” asked Piper, gazing at him out of rapt, emerald-flecked eyes.

Tweenies had loomed large in the English novels of her childhood: romantic, oppressed figures second only to Charles Kingsley’s little chimney sweeps in their power to evoke sympathy and tears.

Chiron clasped his hands behind his back and straightened. He didn’t feel quite capable of explaining to Piper that nothing so mundane as a tweeny would have been allowed within miles of Elham – these unfortunates being confined to middle-class households, which employed only a housemaid and cook.

“I really think, Miss McLean,” said Chiron leaning his head forward earnestly, “that you would be better suited to a different type of employment. A governess, perhaps.”

Piper stood before him, silent. It was not, however, a passive silence. It reminded Chiron inexorably of a puppy not asking to be taken for a walk.

“I promise I will work,” she said at last. “Most truly, I promise it.”

The butler held steady. If there is one thing dreaded by all experienced servants, it is a gently bred female below stairs.

Then Piper McLean produced a single word.

“Please?”

Chiron watched her. This girl: her hands supple, gently bred – without the work-roughened palms of those who had always lived hand to mouth. This girl: her stance graceful and tall, without the crushing world-weariness of those who had lived beneath Atlas’ burden.

Chiron looked closer. To the newer, hidden skin: naivety torn apart. The hardened, tired eyes: stunned by the reality of a careless god. He looked to the desperate purse of her lips, to the imploring arch of her brow. His resolve wavered.

After all, he considered – knowing despite himself, he had already decided – they were only taking her on as a temporary measure. He nodded. “Very well. You can have a month’s trial. Your salary will be twelve and six a week – and _there’s no need to keep on curtsying_!”

* * *

Piper had been dreading sharing a dormitory with the other maids, who would undoubtedly despise her, but she was assigned a little attic room tucked under the domes and urns and chimneys that adorned Elham’s roof. It was stuffy with its one small window, but scrupulously clean, containing an iron bed, a chair, a deal chest, and a ragged rug on the floor.

A brown dress and two starched aprons were laid out for her, along with a white mob cap. Another uniform, black alpaca with a frilled white muslin cap and apron, hung behind the door for special events.

She unpacked quickly, placing Andrea Roderick’s tome on the chair beside her bed.

It was very hot under the roof, and very silent.

Standing in the tiny room, sealed off from the main body of the house and the world she had once known, she felt so bereft and homesick that tears sprang to her eyes.

Her father’s well-remembered voice came to save her. “When you’re sad, Little Star, go out of doors. It’s always better underneath the open sky.”

She went over to the window and pushed it open. If she pulled herself up she could actually climb out onto the ledge that ran behind the balustrade…

A moment later she was standing there, one arm wrapped around the waist of a stone warrior – and sure enough, it was better, it was _good_ … Elham’s roof, glistening in the sunshine, was a happy and insouciant world of its own, with its copper domes and weathervanes, its sculptured knights ready at arms.

The view was breathtaking.

Her hair stirred in the wind.

Facing her was the long avenue of poplars, the gatehouse, and beyond that, the village – with its simple, grey church and trim houses clustered around the green. On her left were the walled gardens and the topiary; to her right, if she craned around her warrior, she saw a landscape out of an Italian dream: a blue lake curving away behind the house, a grassy hill topped by a white temple, an obelisk floating above trees… She could smell freshly cut grass, the blossoming poplars, and hear, in the distance, someone calling their chickens home.

One could be happy here, Piper thought. Standing on the roof of this house, watching the honey-hued stone change colour with the drifting shadows of midday clouds, Piper McLean addressed the absent and unknown earl: “I will make your house beautiful for you. You’ll see.”

Then she climbed down into the room again and picked up the brown print dress. It was too large, but the apron would hold it in. She’d manage for now. The cap, though, was a problem. Whatever angle she put it on, it slipped drunkenly – unbecomingly – over her ears.

She’d grown rather hot and grubby on the roof, and so she set off in search of a bathroom.

It was a foolish and unproductive quest, she soon discovered. Since the Palladian house had been built in 1712 there had been many improvements, but a bathroom on the servants’ floor was not among them.

* * *

 

Rather more servants than usual had gathered in the kitchen for a quick cup of tea as Piper came downstairs. For, of course, news of her foreignness – and her general unsuitability – had spread like wildfire.

The kitchen at Elham was a huge room, high and vaulted, with the range of a battleship and a wooden table large enough to be a skating rink.

Standing at the table now, crumbling pastry like small rain through her short and deft fingers, was Miss Hazel Levesque. Everyone adored her, and she had made the kitchen – so often a forbidden and defended fortress – a place where all the servants could come to rest. Beside Hazel sat the first footman, Frank, one of the few men who had returned to Elham from war.

Under the guidance of Chiron, who he unquestionably revered, Frank had worked himself up from an immigrant lamp boy to his present admired eminence. He had started life weak and undersized, and it was Chiron who, seeing in him a real potential for self-development, had brought him a book describing the exercises designed by the current Mr. Universe.

Since then, Frank had never looked back.

The progress of his wondrously swelling biceps was a matter of continuing concern for the maids, who bore with fortitude the knowledge that the real glories – the fanning of his trapezius across the small of his back, the powerful arch of his carved out glutes – were, for reasons of propriety, forever lost to them.

Next to Frank sat Clarisse, the head housemaid, and below her, Lacy, the last remaining under-housemaid. Luke, the second footman, sat opposite Frank. Katie Gardner and Travis Stoll – the gardener and her protégé– stood by the sink arguing over gardenias. Miss Beauregard sat across from Clarisse, sipping tea.

Even Chiron, who usually took tea in the housekeeper’s room, had lingered by the dresser, conspicuously busying himself with a list.

Light footsteps were heard coming down the flagged stone corridor, and Piper appeared in the doorway.

Clarisse, the brash and audacious housemaid, was the first to see her.

“Here comes the tweeny!” she said.

“Now, Clarisse,” admonished Miss Beauregard gently, eyeing her meaningfully over the lip of her cup. Then, turning to Piper: “Come on in, dear. Have a cup of tea.”

But Clarisse’s jibe had, in any case, fallen flat. Piper smiled with pleasure, came forward to curtsy to Miss Beauregard, and, when bidden to sit down, slipped into a place at the very foot of the table.

The servants exchanged glances.

Whatever was to be wrong with the new housemaid, they had to admit it wasn’t likely to be snobbery or snide.

* * *

The next day, Piper began to work. It was work such as which she had not known existed: not as a nursing orderly in the hospital in St Petersburg, and not as a waitress in the transit camp in Constantinople.

Between the myriad of servants’ attics tucked away between the balustrades and statuary, and the kitchens, pantries, and cellars that ran like catacombs beneath the body of the house, was a world which knew nothing of either.

Here were the great staterooms: the famous library, the picture gallery with its Van Dykes and Titians, the gold salon, and the music room.

It was to the spring cleaning of these, shuttered and shrouded throughout the war, that Chiron had assigned Piper.

“She won’t last two days,” prophesied Clarisse, the prickly head housemaid. “You’ll see, she’ll be back in London with her tail between her legs before the week is out.”

But Lacy wasn’t so sure; there’d been a sort of look about the Russian girl.

That first day, Piper rose at five-thirty, snatched a piece of bread and jam in the servants’ hall, and, by six, clutching her housemaid’s bag, had followed Clarisse, Lacy, and Frank – loaded with buckets, stepladders, druggets and mops – up to the library.

Elham’s library was world famous. Its satinwood bookcases, its pedestal desk and writing tables, were all made by Chippendale and reckoned to be amongst his finest work. A sumptuous, moss green Aubusson rug stretched to the windows of the south terrace, and on the barrel-vaulted ceiling the Muses of Greek myth swam decoratively.

“Oh! What a beautiful room!” gasped Piper, only to receive a sour look from Clarisse, who stood pouring soda into a bucket.

“Here,” she said, handing Piper a bucket of steaming water and a cloth. “Start on this geezer, and don’t drip!”

‘This geezer’ turned out to be Milton in old age. His marble head stared thoughtfully and somewhat snottily, from a plinth between the windows.

When Piper had rinsed and dried the poet’s face, the convolutions of his wig, and the lacework on his Puritan collar, she moved on to Hercules resting – unnecessarily, she could not help feeling – on a slain lion, whose mane had collected a horrible amount of dust.

Next came the overmantel, depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno.

“Better wring your cloth out harder for those,” advised Clarisse, looking with distaste at the tortured souls writhing in agony across the chimney breast. “Bloody sculpture! Hate the thing!”

By this time, Piper’s water was black with dirt, so, carefully, she carried her bucket down a long parquet corridor, across the blue john and jasper tiles of the great hall, down the service stairs, through a green baize door, and into the scullery, where at last Hazel filled it.

She was crossing the great hall again when Fate dealt her an undeserved blow in the form of Luna, who discovered her with yelps of joy in a place where it was proper for a dog such as her to be. After running quick circles around Piper’s skirt, she padded passionately after her into the library.

Neither Frank, trying to dismantle the chandeliers, or Clarisse, cleaning the windows, could prevent her from lying like a felled ox across the foot of the ladder on which Piper – scrubbing Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero in a niche above the door – perched precariously with her bucket.

By lunchtime, Piper’s back ached and her hands were sore; but she persevered, and, though it was hard, kept silence. It was late in the afternoon when, while moving a silver-framed photograph to safety, she found herself staring for the first time at the long awaited earl.

The photograph, taken just before the war, showed a young man and woman standing on the steps leading to the front door. The woman, though older, was youthful, with short, spiked hair and a sharp smile. The other, hardly more than a boy, was slighter, lighter – he’d turned half away, as if looking at a landscape visible to him alone.

“That’s Lady Thalia, the one that was killed,” said Lacy, appearing over her shoulder. She appeared sombre, but grinned and shook her head. “My, she was a troublemaker! We sure had to run for it when she was around!”

“And this is the new earl? Her brother?”

“That’s right. Mr Jason he was then. He’s much quieter. Got a lovely smile, though.”

“He looks nice, I think,” Piper said. And, stepping over the recumbent Luna, she began to scrub the cold and protuberant stomach of Frederick the Great.

Just before it was time to pack up for the day, Chiron appeared silently and took Clarisse aside.

“Any difficulties?” He inclined his head toward Piper.

“Not really,” said Clarisse reluctantly. “Except for that bloody dog following her about. She’s as green as they come, of course, but she hasn’t stopped. Not for a minute. And I have to say, you don’t need to tell her anything twice.”

* * *

On her third day at Elham, Piper discovered that the second footman, so calm and authoritative in the servants hall, had a bedridden and deeply eccentric mother, with whom he shared a cottage in the stable block.

She had spent the whole day in the windowless scullery, washing piece by piece the Meissen dinner service – a tedious and frighteningly responsible job, which, to both their vague surprise, Chiron had entrusted her.

But upon seeing her pallor and the circles beneath her eyes, Miss Beauregard had sent her out to the kitchen gardens with a message for the under-gardener, Travis.

Piper was on her way back, crossing the stable-yard, when a pot of geraniums flew out of an upstairs window and crashed into pieces at her feet.

Retrieving the remains of the shattered pot and going to investigate, she found herself in the presence of a ferociously frail old lady, eyeing her like a beleaguered ferret from the end of her high brass bed. Various lumps under her blankets indicated that she had taken the silver to bed in case of burglars.

“Who are you? Why are you dressed like that?” She sounded panicked, nearly childlike. “Where’s Luke? I need my tea.” Her eyes flicked to the door, and her hands tugged on a loose thread of her nightgown.

Piper smiled warmly. “I am dressed like this because I am a housemaid. Luke is currently decanting the claret, and if you permit I will bring your tea.”

Half an hour later, Luke, noticing with foreboding the remains of the broken flowerpot, hastily ascended the stairs to his mother’s room.

To his faint surprise, he found her absorbed in a game of dominoes – in which, with a knowing expertise that shattered him, the new housemaid was cheating in order to let his mother win.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Mother,” he began. He knew how she got when he was gone too long: how she started to believe he had been cruelly taken by the war.

“Not to worry, dear,” she said softly, moving a piece.

Only when Piper had left did she ask again: “Who is that girl? Why is she dressed like that?”

“I’ve told you, mother. She’s the new housemaid.”

She looked thoughtful. “No. That’s not it.”

* * *

 

Piper had been at Elham for a week before she met the first member of the family.

In addition to the Lady Sally Jackson, the dowager countess, were her three children: Percy, Tyson, and Penelope. The only one of these to remain at Elham was Percy – returned from war a few months before.

It being Lacy’s day off, Piper was instructed to take up his tea.

“You want to listen outside the door,” Clarisse told Piper. “There’ll be some music playing on the gramophone. If it’s the stuff that’s all loud and wailing and women shrieking, you want to be careful. Especially there’s this one called the Libby’s Tott or something. If he’s playing that you want to put the tray down and leave as soon as possible.” She considered for a moment. “But if it’s that stuff that sounds like church – you know, all on a level and not much tune – then it’s all right to have a chat.” She smiled and shoved the tray into Piper’s hands.

It was with a sinking heart that Piper, pausing outside Mr Percy’s door, heard the unmistakable sound of the Liebestod issuing forth.

Isolde was dying, and she was dying hard.

Bracing herself, Piper knocked and entered.

Percy Jackson was reclining on a large Chesterfield, his eyes closed in thoughtful ecstasy, his hands folded on his stomach.

He was young, with unruly, coal black hair and a creased face. Permanent worry lines pinched the skin between his brows; the dimples on his checks twitched with thoughts that never made it past gritted teeth.

His room resembled the den of a musical badger – strewn with manuscript paper, ashtrays, music stands, and books. Cigarette ash dotted his hair. He seemed hectic, on the move, even while completely stationary. Something about him – the heaving chest, the lightly tapping fingers, the slightly tilted head – resembled a hummingbird prepared for flight.

“Leave it there.” Without opening his eyes, he gestured faintly to the table beside him.

Piper advanced. The music surged and gathered force, its leitmotif transfigured in one of Wagner’s brilliant changes of key. And, as the bereaved soprano prepared to fall ecstatically upon her lover’s corpse, Piper gave a deep sigh and said, “Oh, say what you will, but it is beautiful.”

Percy’s eyes opened sharply. He turned his head to appraise her.

Contrary to his character, his eyes were the candid, watery-green of a small child. A child who’d looked upon the world with wonder, hoped for the best, and still been heartlessly, doubtlessly, irreparably broken.

But of course. He’d been in the war, too.

Piper stood in the middle of the room, the tea tray clasped to her chest. Her gold-tinged eyes were wide and shining. “Who is it singing? Not Tettrazini, I think?”

“Johanna Gadski.” He sat forward, his arms crossed, elbows resting on his knees, head tilted up to look at her. He hadn’t been made this speechless for some time. “The best Isolde in the world, without doubt.”

Piper smiled. “My father didn’t care for Wagner. He found it too… excited.”

The music, its reminder of home, had dangerously made her forget her status. “He and Chaliapin used to argue relentlessly.”

“Come here,” said Percy. At her hesitation, he closed his eyes. “ _Please?_ ”

Cautiously she came forward and put down the tray.

At the sound of her movement, he reopened his eyes to observe her.

The music mesmerised her. She turned to the gramophone like a sunflower to the light.

“Stay and listen.” He was careful not to touch her. The other servants had doubtless warned her of his temper; whether or not such temper actually existed was irrelevant, he supposed. “It’s nearly over. Sit a while?”

She shook her head. “I mustn’t. I’m a maid.” Even Wagner could not efface the thought of Andrea Roderick’s views on a maid sitting in the presence of her employers.

But the music held her, and, caught in its toll, she compromised and slipped to her knees beside the sofa, her elbows resting on the arm.

She faced the gramophone, and he watched her.

When it was over, she sighed deeply and turned toward him, her face mirroring that of a someone returning from another world, that look of having drowned at home – suffocation confused for warmth, sinking confused for belonging.

“It’s kind of you to let me listen. It’s hard to live without music.”

A single thought slipped passed his guard: “There’s no need for you to do so.”

She had made him forget himself. Or rather, she made him forget the person he was supposed to be.

“I have a good collection of records. I can play whatever you would like.”

Piper shook her head. It wasn’t allowed. She adjusted his teacup and saucer, avoiding eye contact with him. She needed to change the subject. Something in the way he talked about music reminded her of her father. “Were you a musician? Before…”

The word hung between them. Before.

Before the war.

“I wanted to be.” He swallowed. His dimple twitched with restraint. “I played the piano and composed a bit. But they wouldn’t let me. The aristocracy don’t like their sons to do anything insensible,” he said drily.

“Oh, I know! It’s horrible!” said Piper. “I also have suffered in this way. I wanted so much to be a ballet dancer and they would not let me.”

“I have some ballet music also. Casse Noisette… The Sleeping Beauty…”

“And Stravinsky? Is it recorded yet? The Rite of Spring?”

“No.” He pulled a cigar out of the case beside him. “I definitely do not have that.” He didn’t light it; he simply rolled the tip of it between his fingers. “In my opinion, The Rite of Spring is a work totally lacking in melody or sense.”

“But no!” Piper’s cry rent the air. For a moment it looked as if, Andrea Roderick notwithstanding, she might very well stamp her foot. “It’s not true! One must be modern!”

“If to be modern is to be cacophonous, discordant, and obscure,” began Percy…

And without further thought, battle most enjoyable ensued. For a while, Percy forgot war, forgot the person he had become, and remembered the person he had been.

Piper, coming down half an hour later, fearful of a reprimand, was greeted by an interested cluster of faces.

The Russian girl was flushed and muttering beneath her breath.

“He swore at you then,” said Clarisse. “Did he swear at you?”

“No, no, he didn’t,” she said absently.

Something had changed in him between the moment she had arrived and the moment she had left. It appeared to be a good change.

She hoped to do the same for the rest of Elham.

Hazel slid a cup into her hand.

“Now drink your tea,” she said. “There’s more work to be done.”

* * *

For the Dowager Countess of Selbourne, Chiron would have laid down his life.

Nevertheless, when about ten days after Piper’s arrival he was informed by Silena that the Dowager Countess required someone to deliver a message, he was not pleased.

The dowager was a small, vague looking woman in her fifties. Her hair, although somewhat overcome with shades of silver and grey, still possessed its natural glossy brown. She was a deeply kind and compassionate woman, who bore with fortitude the loss of many people she had loved: her husband, her mother, her father, her nieces and nephews.

Having lost so many, the few that remained she held onto with a vice-like grip. Her eldest son lived just down the hall – although broken by war, he was still alive, and that she could be thankful for.

The people she truly loved could perhaps be counted on two hands, but of these few people, the ones she could see and love every day could be counted on three fingers.

All she had were her letters. Letters to her precious daughter, her darling second son, to Miss Chase, and her father. To Mr Blofis at the schoolhouse. To her dear sister-in-law.

She had always sent letters – she loved to write, and receiving her letters was always a privilege – but while her eldest son and her nephew were pulled away to war, they had become an overwhelmingly frequent occurrence. And Chiron rarely had spare hands to deliver them.

Today was one of those days.

“I can’t spare any of the men today,” he informed Silena. “We have all of the pictures in the long gallery to hang, and the music room’s not even started yet.”

“I know. But someone has to go.”

“Why don’t you send the tweeny?” This was from Clarisse, who stood mixing furniture polish in the pantry opposite them. When both Silena and Chiron simply stared at her, she shrugged. “She’s mad on fresh air, and it would get that daft dog out of the house for a bit.”

And so Piper was sent.

Upon entering the dowager’s private quarters half an hour later, Piper found herself in a familiar world. Her own mother's apartments had contained a similar clutter of books, potted plants, and paper. Stacks of paper rested everywhere – some blank, some with one line or two, but mostly pages and pages of writing scrawled in tiny, scrunched together cursive. Intricately embroidered rugs of various colours and designs ran across the floor, overlapping each other and unbalancing the many tables, chairs, and lamps scattered around the room.

“Come in, my dear. You’re the new maid? The Russian girl?”

Piper nodded in assent.

“Good. I thought so.” The Countess smiled a warm and motherly smile, and Piper’s heart sank with grief. She smothered her anguish and waited silently.

“Now,” the Countess continued, “I want you to deliver a very important message. It’s for a dear friend of mine, Miss Chase. Can you find her house? It’s quite near to the church. With an apple tree in the garden.”

“Yes, my lady, I’m sure I can.”

“Good. Now I want you to find her – she’ll probably be outside at this time of day – and deliver a letter. Now if you can’t find her right away, try looking up the apple tree, she’s always climbing up in there. Something about the light, better for reading she says. Easier to concentrate.” She broke off her face drawing blank. Her face scrunched in frustration. “Where was I?”

“You were going to give me a letter, my lady.”

“That’s right!” She turned and began rummaging in her escritoire. “Here it is.” She held the letter aloft triumphantly. “What am I like?”

She spoke with such warmth and familiarity, it was as if they had known each other for years, not mere minutes.

Piper took the letter and bent to pick up the scarf that had slipped from the dowager’s shoulders. She was rewarded with a charming smile, which changed suddenly to a look of intense scrutiny.

“My goodness! Really that is most remarkable. Just stand over there, dear, where I can see you properly.”

Puzzled, Piper went to stand by the window.

“Most unusual. Really, quite amazing. You can be very, very, proud.”

“Proud of what, my lady?”

“Your aura. It’s one of the purest I’ve ever seen. Especially the orange. Only it isn’t orange so much as flame. But a very gentle flame. Like candlelight. Like starlight, even.” She broke off.

Piper had begun to cry.

It was only in that moment she realised… she had never properly allowed herself time to grieve. She hadn’t cried once before now. As a lump formed in her front, she could finally feel it all catching up to her. She was no longer numb – a heaviness, a freezing weight, filled her from her shoulders down.

The Countess moved as if to stand, her eyes filled with concern. “Oh dear. What did I say?”

“It’s nothing,” said Piper, ducking her head. “I’m sorry. It’s just… it’s something my father used to call me. I will go and find Miss Chase right away.”

Forgetting, for once in her life, to curtsy, Piper fled.

She was all grief.

All ice, and pain, and grief.

* * *

And so, day by day, Elham yielded to the energy and attack of its staff and grew more and more beautiful. The shutters were thrown open to the light, and Mrs Gardner brought in great vases of poinsettias and lilies. The silver table pieces, burnished by Frank to unbelievable perfection, were returned to the state dining room, and the freshly washed chandeliers sparkled in the sunlight. The men took their liveries out of mothballs, and the maids were assigned new aprons.

Until, on a particularly hot mid-June night, Piper – who had that very day polished one hundred and thirty-eight banister rails, crawled along the interminable parquet floor of the gallery with a tin of wax and turpentine, and beaten fifteen Persian rugs – opened her attic window, leant her weary head on her arms, and addressed the absent earl.

“It is ready now. You can come.”

And the next day, he did.


End file.
